Leading white nationalist accused of threats on message app
Associated Press | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 5 years, 11 months AGO
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — A leading white nationalist has been indicted and arrested on federal charges that he threatened to rape the wife of a person with whom he was having a dispute.
Christopher Cantwell, a New Hampshire resident who rose to prominence in 2017 after a violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, is accused of using the Telegram messaging app to make the threat on June 16, 2019. The person with whom he was messaging hasn't been identified.
The FBI tweeted that it arrested Cantwell, of Keene, on Thursday morning without incident. He faces charges of extortion and sending interstate threats and is scheduled to be arraigned Thursday afternoon in Concord.
Cantwell's public defender, Eric Wolpin, did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
Cantwell pleaded guilty in 2018 to assault after he was accused of using pepper spray against two counterprotesters during a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Cantwell, who has hosted self-produced radio shows, also has history of posting threatening messages over social media.
In March, he wrote that he thought the Gab social media platform had banned him for a post after the deadly New Zealand mosque shootings in which he wrote, “I’m pretty sure it would be against the rules for me to say that would be mass shooters should find left wing activists and gun them down instead of random people in mosques and synagogues. So I won’t do that.”
Last year, attorneys who filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in connection with the Charlottesville rally asked a judge to order Cantwell to stop making "unlawful threats" against the plaintiffs and their lead attorney.
In a motion filed in U.S. District Court in Charlottesville, lawyers for 10 people who were hurt during the two days of violence in August 2017 said Cantwell had recently focused "his hateful rhetoric" on attorney Roberta Kaplan.
They allege that Cantwell, responding to an article about Kaplan in a Jewish publication, used an anti-Semitic slur on a social media website when referring to Kaplan and wrote that after she “loses this fraudulent lawsuit, we're going to have a lot of (expletive) fun with her.”
Cantwell, responding to an email seeking comment on the motion to order him to stop making threats, used an anti-Semitic slur when referring to Kaplan and called the lawsuit a “(expletive) fraud.”
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